Know Your Limits

There is a reticence I feel when writing about screwing up a dish. Nobody wants to read about bad food, why would they read articles by someone who makes the same mistakes they could? So after a failure this weekend, I was hesitant to write this morning. Never-mind that I successfully made ice cream twice this weekend, my first two times (caramel and sea salt and honey-rosemary). That is not what I think about as I sit down to inform my readers out there in internet land. I can think only of my screw ups this weekend.

I’ve long known that baking is not for me. I don’t like measuring and I hate recipes, baking is an exact science, these are necessities. With cooking I can toss and taste and fix and play, but with baking everything must be done as told. Last fall I posted about a messed up pumpkin pie. Today it was meringues. I had 10 leftover egg whites from making ice cream with the yolk and, of course, plenty of baker’s sugar. So the thing that came to mind was meringues. They didn’t work. An hour and a half, three tired pairs of arms and one wussy one armed mixer later, we gave up. It only went on this long because I have great friends who helped and tried to encourage me to keep trying, helping to whip while I prepared the salmon for dinner. But in the end, it was a failure.

So what comes out of this? I think the lesson is that I’ve learned my limits. I just won’t follow a recipe, so why should I try? Yes, it would make me a more well rounded cook, but it is just painful when it happens, and let’s be honest, I don’t really like sweet stuff anyways (except caramel and sea salt ice cream!). So I will continue to perfect my ability to cook delicious savory items and if you ever come to dinner, expect your only dessert to be ice cream!

Gourd-Tastic, Part 2: A failed pumpkin pie

Okay, I know I should pretend I am fantastic at everything and all, but I admit it–I failed at pumpkin pie. Not directly through any fault of my own, of course. Not really.

Basically I have never made a pie before and at B’s suggestion, decided to try my hand at it. Using the beginner’s bible (aka Mark Bittman’s How to Make Everything) I followed a pretty simple recipe for flaky pre baked pie crust. Problem 1: I didn’t have unsalted butter. Okay, no problem, I like salt, I omitted the salt from the recipe and used salted butter. Then I started making the filling. Problem 2: We had about half the cream we needed and none of the ginger. I was prepared to use whipped cream cheese instead, but B would have none of it. We went to the store and got more cream. We came back. I put the cream on the counter and opened the ginger. I went along my merry way, following instructions, happily baking as B carved the pumpkin. I put the pie in the oven a let out a sigh of relief. My very first pie. After about 10 of the 30 minutes it was supposed to cook, I began to clean up, and to my horror, uncovered the unopened container of cream. In our rush to find the right ingredient, I had ended up including none of it. No cream, no cream cheese.

So, alas, my first pie was a failure. It then got knocked off the cooling rack by my roommate so by the time I got a picture of it the inside had come detached from the crust anyways. It tastes alright, pretty much like a pie that doesn’t have any cream in it (Making it a good illustration of why low-fat food tastes so bad).